Learn about the latest tips, tutorials, upcoming events and certifications
This post provides a general macro that enables you to easily display special characters (Unicode) in axis table columns.
My new SAS Press book “An Introduction to SAS Visual Analytics” (written in collaboration with Tricia Aanderud and Rob Collum) covers all of the different aspects of SAS® Visual Analytics, including how to develop reports, load data, and handle administration. Below is an example of the types of tips that you can find
SAS 9.4 maintenance release 5 was released on Sept 19, 2017. This release includes many new items including integration with SAS Viya and SAS Studio, a web application for SAS development. Also Included with this release are some cool new features in the graphics domain, some of which were requested
Sometimes life is just too busy, and I bet many of you feel the same way. If you’re like me, you’re playing a number of roles: employee, spouse, parent, community leader, coach and so on. With all the craziness, it’s likely we’re shortchanging another role that’s critically important to our
If you perform a weighted statistical analysis, it can be useful to produce a statistical graph that also incorporates the weights. This article shows how to construct and interpret a weighted histogram in SAS. How to construct a weighted histogram Before constructing a weighted histogram, let's review the construction of
How can you specify weights for a statistical analysis? Hmmm, that's a "weighty" question! Many people on discussion forums ask "What is a weight variable?" and "How do you choose a weight for each observation?" This article gives a brief overview of weight variables in statistics and includes examples of
On a recent visit to an In-House Users Group meeting at a Pharmaceutical company, I presented a 1/2 day seminar on creating Clinical Graphs using SG Procedures. Polling the audience for their experience with these procedures indicated that many SAS users are not familiar with these new ways to create graphs. So,
In a large simulation study, it can be convenient to have a "control file" that contains the parameters for the study. My recent article about how to simulate multivariate normal clusters demonstrates a simple example of this technique. The simulation in that article uses an input data set that contains
Pearson's correlation measures the linear association between two variables. Because the correlation is bounded between [-1, 1], the sampling distribution for highly correlated variables is highly skewed. Even for bivariate normal data, the skewness makes it challenging to estimate confidence intervals for the correlation, to run one-sample hypothesis tests ("Is
You can use SG Annotation (and its GTL equivalent) to display one graph inside another.
Toe bone connected to the foot bone, Foot bone connected to the leg bone, Leg bone connected to the knee bone,... — American Spiritual, "Dem Bones" Last week I read an interesting article on Robert Kosara's data visualization blog. Kosara connected the geographic centers of the US zip codes in
This article shows how to simulate data from a mixture of multivariate normal distributions, which is also called a Gaussian mixture. You can use this simulation to generate clustered data. The adjacent graph shows three clusters, each simulated from a four-dimensional normal distribution. Each cluster has its own within-cluster covariance,
If you use SAS regression procedures, you are probably familiar with the "stars and bars" notation, which enables you to construct interaction effects in regression models. Although you can construct many regression models by using that classical notation, a friend recently reminded me that the EFFECT statement in SAS provides
I hate hard-coding variable lists in my SAS code. I love the special variable lists SAS provides, like name:, _numeric_, etc. But back in 2011, I wrote a post titled Jedi SAS Tricks - Building a Name Suffix variable list lamenting the lack of a special variable list in base
My daughter is a junior in high school, and for almost every semester she’s taken an online course as part of her studies. This semester she’s taking Spanish 3, an advanced level course where every word of instruction is spoken in Spanish. Each morning she joins the class from our
What’s your favorite time of day? For me, it’s the morning with a cup of coffee, just as the sun starts to appear on the horizon, emitting a pleasant warm glow. My least favorite part of the day? Mornings without coffee when that same big ball of light makes a
I have been working in the field of Professional Certification and Licensure for roughly 10 years. In that time, I've worked with and observed close to 40 IT certification programs and there has been a recurring question I've encountered at each stop. While it is often phrased differently, it means mostly the same
The stored compiled macro facility enables you to compile and save your macro definition in a permanent catalog in a library that you specify. The macro is compiled only once. When you call the macro in the current and subsequent SAS® sessions, SAS executes the compiled code from the macro
This question has been asked repeatedly for decades by anyone facing a new system. That system might be a new product, a new piece of equipment, a new process, or anything really that is new and not well understood. Ultimately, you might need to change this system but first you
I frequently get asked about my favorite book on a particular topic, how to find free SAS learning materials online, how to get help with SAS issues, etc. So I thought I'd share it with you here! Last updated 2/25/2020 Getting Started Resources New to SAS? Here's your SAS Starter
When someone refers to the correlation between two variables, they are probably referring to the Pearson correlation, which is the standard statistic that is taught in elementary statistics courses. Elementary courses do not usually mention that there are other measures of correlation. Why would anyone want a different estimate of
In this post I describe the important tasks of data preparation, exploration and binning.These three steps enable you to know your data well and build accurate predictive models. First you need to clean your data. Cleaning includes eliminating variables which have uneven spread across the target variable. I give an
In my prior posts (Data-driven SAS macro loops, Modifying variable attributes in all datasets of a SAS library, Automating the loading of multiple database tables into SAS tables), I presented various data-driven applications using SAS macro loops. However, macro loops are not the only tools available in SAS for developing
A SAS user needed to convert a program from MATLAB into the SAS/IML matrix language and asked whether there is a SAS/IML equivalent to the fliplr and flipud functions in MATLAB. These functions flip the columns or rows (respectively) of a matrix; "LR" stands for "left-right" and "UD" stands for
I use SAS Enterprise Guide every day, and for a wide variety of tasks. As a result, I have a huge collection of project files (EGP files) and SAS program files. I have always relied on the "recently used" list in the File menu to provide me with quick access
El aumento desmesurado de los datos y la latente necesidad de aprovecharlos para tomar mejores decisiones, ha llevado a que soluciones como las de la analítica no solo estén al servicio del crecimiento de los negocios, sino que tengan un alto impacto en la calidad de vida de las personas
Trivial Pursuit, Justin Bieber and Timbits. Some pretty great things have come from Canada, eh? Well, you can go ahead and add expert SAS programmers to that impressive list. In this video, six Canadian SAS programmers, with more than 115 years of SAS programming experience between them, share some of their favorite, little-known SAS programming tips. You're sure to discover a new trick or
When it comes to economic activity, a handful of the largest metropolitan areas in the US account for lion's share. In 2013, the top 23 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) accounted for 50% of the total US Gross Domestic Product (GDP). I recently came across a map created by Alexandr Trubetskoy
SAS is hosting the premier analytics conference in the world September 18-20 in Washington DC, and supplementing the event with discounted training and certification exams at SAS Analytics Experience 2017. These offerings will be held before and after the event. As at other SAS events, we will be offering certification exams at
If you’re familiar with the SAS story, you know that we have deep roots in academia. But our CEO Jim Goodnight has always known that roots aren’t enough to achieve incremental growth. You also have to plant seeds. Analytics alone can’t drive change, help businesses succeed and make the world
